Courts should hesitate to impose a custodial sentence for the possession of child pornography except in certain circumstances, according to one of the country's leading authorities on sentencing, Mr Tom O'Malley.
He told the prosecutors' conference that a custodial sentence should be considered only where there was an unusually large number of images, and where a reasonable proportion of them show actual children being abused, or where the children shown are very young.
The court should also have regard to the impact the adverse publicity arising from the conviction would have on the offender, he said.
He said that the guiding principle of Irish sentencing policy was that the sentence must be proportionate to the offence and the personal circumstances of the offender.
He stressed that only in the most extreme and exceptional cases should a custodial sentence be imposed when all or most of the images are computer-generated, or when they are in some way pseudo-images of children.
"A custodial sentence may be appropriate when the offender has been involved in distributing, exchanging or trading in child pornography," he said.
He also advocated a custodial sentence when an offender had been engaged over a period of time in distributing child pornography.
Aggravating factors in assessing the level of sentence would include whether the images have been distributed to one or more children; whether the offender had traded in the images for gain; whether there were previous convictions and whether the images had been posted on the Internet in a way that made them accessible to the public, he said.
These general principles had been drawn up by the Sentencing Advisory Panel in Britain, which itself drew on the classifications developed by the COPINE institute in UCC, he pointed out.
He said that punishment for possession of child pornography now went beyond a prison sentence, when that was imposed. It also included registration on the sex offenders' register, which imposed significant restrictions on an offender's movements.
It also involved ongoing public ostracism.
"People are hounded long after they have served their sentences, especially if it relates to child pornography.
"There is a need for public education that the essence of punishment is that it is finite in nature. People should be able to fully re-enter society."
Mr O'Malley said that internationally the criminalisation of child pornography had developed in the context of constitutional guarantees of free speech.
"Laws proscribing the possession and dissemination of child pornography are valid only to the extent that they are deemed to constitute permissible limitations on the certain fundamental human rights," he said.
There was now broad international consensus that the dissemination and possession of child pornography may be the cause of real harm and may therefore be legitimately prohibited by the criminal law.